joseph@garfield.UUCP (02/04/86)
Hello Amiga land,
I run a BBS in Newfoundland and wish to expand it into a multi-user system. From all the readings I can find it seems that this would be possible.
My question is can a multi-user (lets say [3-4] ) BBS
run on a commodore Amiga from Basic?
One other questions that I have is, what Hardware will i need to make it possible to have [3-4] users on at one time? ( [3-4] phone modems?? )
Well I hope someone out in Amiga land can help me.
Yours in need of help,
Joseph Dawson
(joseph@garfield.UUCP) ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo L. Schwab) (02/08/86)
[ O Great Line Eating Bug, please accept this humble sacrifice.... ] Funny you should ask about that. I'm planning on writing a multi- user BBS for the Amiga as well, although I plan on doing it in C. Personally, I don't think you have much choice but to use C. It occurrs to me that BASIC is just too slow for such a thing, particularly if you plan on hanging 3-4 users on it. Granted, it won't be user- modifiable, but at least it won't thrash. A good compromise might be FORTH (I said _might_, geez!). Unless I'm sadly mistaken, you're going to need a seperate phone line and serial port for each user you want to be able to get on. I hear tale of on company that puts out 4 modems in one box (I have no idea how this is arranged; anybody out there know?), which may help. I strongly suggest looking at as many different kinds of BBS software as you can, so you can get ideas and decide what you like and what you hate. You also (sadly) have to take system security into account, making sure a remote user can't get some form of a CLI, and also decide how you want to do the system administration (this part is really easy to botch up from a user-interface standpoint). Then once you've got a solid idea of how you want the system to look and "feel," you get to grind out the code. If anyone out there thinks I've left anything out, lemme know. Leo L. Schwab well!ewhac dual!unicom!schwab ------ I'm new to the net, and have no idea how signatures should look.
mykes@3comvax.UUCP (Mike Schwartz) (02/10/86)
I have one question about an Amiga based multi-user bbs: Who is going to be around to hit Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga when one of the users gets a "task held" or some other guru meditation. I figure that if you could redirect a CLI to read and write from the serial port, you could turn the Amiga into a two-user machine. The drawback was crashes... It seems that application programs can use malloc, or whatever, and can deal rationally with an out of memory condition. The OS dead end alerts when it can't allocate memory, and a lot of the time it reboots by itself.
bruceb@amiga.UUCP (Bruce Barrett) (02/10/86)
In article <621@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo L. Schwab) writes: >[ O Great Line Eating Bug, please accept this humble sacrifice.... ] > > Funny you should ask about that. I'm planning on writing a multi- >user BBS for the Amiga as well, although I plan on doing it in C. > There seems to be a BBS that will support 2 modems (well, it's a start) Brown-Wagh Publishing 100 Verona Court Los Gatos, CA 95030 (800)451-0900 (Calif = (408)395-3838 ) They were selling (offering for sale, I didn't actually see a sales transaction in the ~5 min I was at their booth) them at the Commodore Show in San Francisco last weekend. Literature claimes it's good, Price = $99.95, "runs in background" --Bruce Barrett (No connection with the above co.)